The World's Most Evil Gangs by Nigel Blundell Read Free Book Online Page A

he’d come. I could do a favour for the President.’
    Thomas DiBella, who was briefly the Colombo family boss in the 1970s, expressed the Mafia philosophy: ‘You are no better or worse than anyone else in La Cosa Nostra. You are your own man. You and your father are now equals. Your father, sons, and brothers have no priority. We are all as one, united in blood. Once you become part of this, there is no greater bond.’
    Joe Bonanno, who became boss of one of America’s most enduring crime families, waxed almost lyrical when he said: ‘Mafia is a process, not a thing. Mafia is a form of clan-cooperation to which its individual members pledge lifelong loyalty. Friendship, connections, family ties, trust, loyalty, obedience – this was the glue that held us together.’
    Gambino under-boss Aniello Dellacroce was less eloquent: ‘You don’t understand Cosa Nostra. Cosa Nostra means the boss is your boss. Boss is the boss is the boss. What I’m trying to say is a boss is a boss. What does a boss mean in this fuckin’ thing? You might as well make anybody off the street.’ ‘Things change now because there’s too much conflict. People do whatever they feel like. They don’t train their people no more. There’s no more respect.’
    Anthony Casso, a homicidal maniac who ran the Lucchese crime family, nevertheless felt the need to show his sensitive side. ‘I truly feel sorry for the younger generation that wants to belong to that life. It’s sad for them. There is absolutely no honour and respect today. Little do the newcomers know that there are many made members in the Mafia that wish not to be there and would like nothing better than to walk away from it. So they do the next best thing: stay low-key if possible. Theyoung newcomers will never see the kind of big money that was once made. That’s long gone. They don’t realise what it means to be free and to have peace of mind until it’s taken from them.’ Casso also declared his domestic loyalty. ‘Most all men in my life, everyone I know, had girlfriends. It goes with the territory. Women are drawn to us, the power, the money, and we’re drawn to them. But only in passing. Some guys treated their mistresses better than their wife but that’s outrage. No class. Only a
cafone
[ill-mannered peasant] does that. I never loved any woman but Lillian. She and my family always came first.’
    But Frank Costello, who was known as the ‘Prime Minister of the Underworld’, did not think so highly of his family: ‘Other kids are brought up nice and sent to Harvard and Yale. Me? I was brought up like a mushroom.’
    Family business meant something completely different to Antonio ‘Tony Ducks’ Corallo, a union racketeer at the head of the Lucchese family, who said: ‘Let’s take a son-in-law, somebody, put them into the (union) office; they got a job. Let’s take somebody’s daughter, whatever, she’s the secretary. Let’s staff it with our people. And when we say go break this guy’s balls, they’re there, seven o’clock in the morning, to break the guy’s balls.’
    Jimmy Hoffa, the most infamous union leader of them all, obviously agreed. ‘Everybody has a price,’ he said – shortly before he was murdered by Mafia hitmen. Talking of which, Los Angeles gang boss Mickey Cohen passed off his murderous ways with the excuse: ‘I never killed a guy who didn’t deserve it.’ But Chicago hitman Joseph ‘Joe Batters’ Accardo once freed a victim with the words: ‘Let him go. He cheated me fair and square.’ This was somewhat out of character for the killer hiredby Al Capone to attend one of his dinners and publicly beat to death two of the guests with a baseball bat.
    Some of the most revelatory quotations from a Mafia leader are those of John Gotti, labelled the ‘Teflon Don’ because of the number of charges that failed to stick. When he was finally convicted, however, it was partly because of an FBI bug that recorded him describing his criminal